Service Learning pedagogy in Language Education. A research introduction.

Today’s global challenges, such as social inclusion, intercultural competence and linguistic-diversity preservation, seek for a change to make foreign language learning meaningful. This means opening Language Education (LE) to global and intercultural citizenship education as well as Plurilingual Education. The intercultural and social dimension of LE has been operationalized as “Intercultural Service Learning” (ISL), drawing on Service Learning (SL), and “Intercultural Citizenship education in the foreign language classroom”. Despite the value of these pedagogical frameworks, there is the need to further develop research on implanting SL in the foreign language classroom, especially when framing Educational Linguistics with a plurilingual perspective and involving primary school students and teachers. Drawing from this scenario, this extended abstract introduces a research in the Language and Global Education framework which intends to explore the affordances of a SL project with a linguistic focus for Plurilingual Education in primary school.